Open the window to my past and our future* Young Chronicle is an e-Zine for which I will be contributing every month in 2012. Here next you can download the January issue YC and have a glimpse into the young people & share a piece of their lives.

Errorsfound in the Kindle version of my novel BUTTERFLY, including those that occurred during conversion and the ones I overlooked. I am fully responsible for the latter. I will be updating this list, I welcome my readers to report your findings should there be things that cause pain in your neck as they do mine.

“…AD and the other old age disease. To let the fancy roam. Feel free. After that I can handle life – What’s up, champion? I see something is bothering you?”Reigan tells. He deliberately left out the crucial part, only arguing that they will need extra sickrooms…(Layout is wrong in Kindle, it screwed up my intention!)“ …the story puzzled me back then.It still does today.”There is a local legend about dolphin males trying their shotgun with pearl diving girls, said the woman, grinning.

“…in case you are hungry, which I think you are – ” he reaches for the shopping bag on the floor,

“…The thrill I never knew before! I thought I would be punished one day for being so happy. ”

Image: The original butterfly tattoo was created by the British artist Damien Hirst, tattooed to the crotch of Shauna Taylor, a 23-year-old model who wants to give birth through a piece of art. The image was the debut cover of Dasha Zhukova’s provocative art & fashion magazine Garage. Image slightly modified by J O’Yang.

A shamelessly original work of art that you can read legally outside China

*Butterfly is a passionate piece of prose full of unexpected wonderment. Taking us into a stunning world that has been considered impossible before, Julie O’Yang convinces us that the power of human spirit is capable of bringing a change to the long-standing outlook of values and beliefs. Ma Jian, author of Beijing Coma* Butterfly is a tour de force, as strong and delicate as a butterfly's wing on rice paper. An intriguingly original glimpse into the human psyche. Leanne Delehanty, author and visual artist * Confronting us with its subtitle, Butterfly foregrounds itself as nothing more, nor less, than a novel; allowing, inviting, us to flutter through its tale. The book never lets us forget that writing is haunted by echoes of scribere; scratching, tearing. We tear with it as it tears at us—wounding, destroying even, but never devastating. For, amidst everything there is laughter. By never letting facts get in the way of the truth, Julie O’Yang tells us stories. Her gift to us is nothing other than writing itself. Jeremy Fernando, Jean Baudrillard Fellow at The European Graduate School, and author of Reflections on (T)error, Reading Blindly, The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death, and Writing Death

A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point. This is the basic spelling we should know.

Julie O’Yang and Jeremy Fernando converse about writing, reading, art—not just as separate crafts, but as gestures that open registers in each other. A writer is always already her first reader; a painter has to bring both reading and writing together in her imagination whilst—and at their highest level both are forms of art. But, even as they come together, they remain irreducibly different—only perhaps in ways that remain veiled from us. As an acknowledgment that they may never be able to unveil anything about writing, art, or reading—that their conversation is a gamble that may open nothing other than the fact that O’Yang and Fernando are speaking—their dialogue bears echoes of Tumbling Dice.On Reading and Art; or on fluttering & gamble of imagination (feat Tumbling Dice by The Rolling Stones)

*** 'Cause all you women is low down gamblers Cheatin' like I don't know howBut baby, I go crazy, there's fever in the funk house nowThis low down bitchin' got my poor feet a itchin'You know you know the duece is still wild***JF: At the end of Butterfly, A Novel, you comment: “A few liberties have been taken with the historical record in the interest of the truth.” And in an interview with Eric Abrahamsen you state: “Literature is something else, and demands the imagination from the author as much as from the reader.” Clearly, to you, writing is creation, invention. However, we are also never using our own language: it is borrowed, stolen, an act of memory—in other words, an act of reading. How do you see the relationship between writing and reading, an author and her reader?

JO’Y: I have a terrible habit of reading five books at the same time. From Chinese classics I'd jump to T. S. Eliot and then to the latest Scandinavian thrillers or even travel guides, all in the same evening. In the meanwhile, I may have also checked related articles, visual material and films. My working place looks like a disaster area littered with post-apocalyptic disorder. Quite perverse actually that one is led by her whims to such an epic extent. Speaking of perversity. I don’t do Harry Potter though, never did, it’s a children’s book – not in the sense that Andersen is a children’s book, if you know what I mean. To me, reading is essential. But most important of all, all the dead and freshly written letters receive a vitality through my reading. I don’t “read”, I interpret. I gamble on my intuition, my imagination. Most people have very little imagination. They are hardly moved by anything which does not directly touch them, which does not positively hammer its message upon their senses. But even a trifle, should it happen under their very eyes, and within the immediate range of their feelings, will instantly kindle in them a disproportionate amount of excitement. Unfortunately, this infantile – trend, should I say – in reading is encouraged by infantile publishers with their harebrained ambitions. Changes are necessary. If literature is to survive today’s shifting landscape, changes are vital . Authors, I am calling you to think outside the square. Change is a great thing. THINK POSITIVE! After all, Requiem is hot music, isn't it. But take the gamble to WIN!

JO’Y: Sometimes I think it is rather silly that I can’t read normally, that I go through the process of “re-verb” either consciously or unconsciously every time when I pick up a book. I do enjoy a book when I do, though. And that is also what I ask of my reader. Enjoy, and soar on your wings of imagination! If I can’t give the reader this confidence, I consider it my failure. Every book is its own universe; the writer shows the way into a world no matter how weird that world may seem. The writer takes a lot of risks, exposing his deepest fear, obsessions, infatuation and delight to be explored by his reader like the body of a long lost lover. I ask an awful lot, I know. Nevertheless, it is also my love letter to my audience. ***But baby, get it straightYou got to roll me and call me the tumblin'Roll me and call me the tumblin' dice

***JF: Who are some of your influences—both in writing and in art?

JO’Y: Nabokov, Nabokov and Nabokov. Then again, I read everything that catches my attention for some reason. For my art it’s pretty much the same. I am a museum junk. I draw influences from everywhere. Italian masters, ancient Sumi-e ink wash, Modigliani’s lyricism, Francis Bacon’s raw, tender and sore, Georgia O’Keeffe’s sensuality, Caravaggio’s puzzling violence… Recently I delve a little bit more into Durer and some Flemish masters such as Lucas Cranach. The intimacy of the old masters fascinates me; intimacy like “let’s sit down and draw some air today”…Shall I go on with fabulous name-dropping?

JF: Well, naming is a form of citation, of paying tribute to those that came before us, influenced us, taught us. In this way, I see your acknowledgments as a form of humility. But it is always also a manner of setting oneself as part of a lineage, a protection that one sets around oneself. As if to say that if you don’t agree with me, take it up with the network of great names that I name myself as part of.

*** Women think I'm tasty, but they're always tryin' to waste me And make me burn the candle right downBut baby, baby, I don't need no jewels in my crown

***JF: Do you consider yourself an artist? JO’Y: First, in answering to The Stones…I have all sorts of problems and feel often discouraged. Nothing new. Life is life, no exception for an artist. Really, there is no glamour in sweating so much in order to pull yourself through the process of creation. I swear I don’t smell like a flower in bed. I sleep naked because I have learned to tolerate my own presence: the sweating artist.The Greek word “tekhnê” is often (mis)translated as “art”. The word has a taste of craft. The artist is no more than Handarbeiter, but certainly no less.

In ancient Greece, the nine Muses oversee a different field of human creation: Calliope who has a beautiful speech is the guardian of poetry. Clio is the muse of history. Erato, the amorous one, is for lyrical and erotic songs. Euterpe pleases us with music. Melpomene loves tears and tragedy. Polymnia prefers rhetoric. Terpsichore unifies music and dance. Thalia is bird happy and favours comedy and bucolic beauty. Urania, the celestial one, is drunk with stars in the velvet sky. All of them are my guardians and friends. In that sense, I am an artist. Yes. I translate that which I touch with my hands into something others can feel, real and strong, like an injection through your veins. It asks certain skills, not only passive skills. The artist needs to go through the transformation himself in reaction to the reality. Without connection with what happens in the world, without referring to it, art is a dead, cold corpse.

I do, I understand, I show/explain simply, and I’m still puzzled. This is my motto.

JF: Does a writer and an artist (if you consider yourself one; if you don’t then an artisan) have any responsibility towards society? Or is there (primary) responsibility to their craft?

JO’Y: Art deals with the individual and concerns the individual. By exposing him/herself, the artist relates him/herself to a community. She/He has the license to question. She/He has the power to change. She/He represents freedom.

***Jeremy Fernando is Jean Baudrillard Fellow at The European Graduate School. He is also the author of Reflections on (T)error,Reading Blindly, The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death, and Writing Death.